The Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Resilient Day

I thought it was the worst part of my day when the squirrel scratching on the porch roof made it difficult to concentrate on drafting the blog post about resiliency.

Until the less-than-sweet odor confirmed it wasn’t a squirrel and it definitely was not on the roof.

I caught wind of the skunk, under the floor in my bedroom, as the phone rang with news that a close relative had been rushed to the hospital.

Just as I heard the email on my laptop dinging with the rejection of the proposal I’d worked on for days.

Downward Spiral

This kind of day would have resulted in my launching a “poor little me” drama – cursing every cute furry creature who makes their home in the woods that I claim to love living near, freaking out because I was miles away from my family and conspiring to expose the proposal rejecters as the fools they clearly are – more recently than I care to admit.

Instead, I cried for maybe a minute and pouted for a few more. Pouting that long took serious effort.

From Well-Being to Resiliency

I was able to roll with my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day without becoming exhausted or gorging on rich chocolate and cheap wine while I numbed out to a marathon of bad reality TV – as opposed to the good kind? – because I know and manage my PERMA.

That’s the acronym for the 5 well-being domains:

positive emotion

engagement within

relationships

meaning and purpose

achievement

Imagine we each get five buckets, one for each domain, and we fill them with slightly different things and to slightly different levels to create our well-being, that deep sense of OK-ness that goes beyond “whether I’m happy or not.”

Once we get clear about what we need in each bucket and how full we want each one to be, then we can continually rebalance them, through planning and on the fly. With practice, we learn to quickly recalibrate our PERMA to sustain well-being.

Sustained well-being is a sure way to grow resiliency, the ability to bend without breaking.

Living Ironically Ever After

I definitely caught the irony of the doo-doo hitting the proverbial fan the same day I reset the desktop image on my computer to my new resiliency totem, the photo of the scrub pine that fell over but now reaches toward the sky.

The next day, the skunk was safely repatriated to the woods, its tiny entrance to the subfloor of my house sealed off, and my family came together to support one another through the medical emergency.

The project? It’s going to happen, in an even better way than I could have possibly imagined.

The really happy ending to my terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day is that I once again experienced how managing my PERMA, together with the rest of the evidence-based coaching I share and use myself, really does work.

I’m so convinced that creating your perfect imbalance by managing your PERMA and knowing and living your values are so important, I’ve created two new coaching series around to help you create sustainable well-being and integrate your character strengths into your daily life.